originally posted in:Secular Sevens
Hypotheses can never be considered proven in the empirical sense. Science and religion are just varying degrees of uncertainty.
English
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..are you sure about that? Hypotheses are proven all the time. It's part of how science works.
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A hypothesis only upgrades to theory if evidence supports said hypothesis. This still has uncertainty, which is why theories tend to be debunked over time. That's what he's saying.
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Hypotheses are taken to be true given the weight of evidence. [b]This is not proof[/b]. It's as close to proof as we can replicate. Take an imaginary hypothesis about stars. I can hypothesise that "All stars must have property X". I can look at every star, and see whether or not it has property X. If every star has property X, I can say with pretty damn good certainty that my hypothesis is true - but I'll never [i]know[/i] if it's correct. In science "proven" is used as shorthand for "very probably true". Having said that, mathematical proof is quite different, and is indeed empirical and universal, provided mathematical axioms are correct.
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